


Code Name Cassandra

by Valeris



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Relationship, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Body Dysphoria, Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Daughter, Darcyland, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Identity Issues, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-03-15 15:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 19,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3451598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valeris/pseuds/Valeris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy has always had a way with technology that has kept other people at a distance.  It's her choice to be a hero that brings them close again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Discovery

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Thanks for not burning up the whole ship.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3247865) by [Valeris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valeris/pseuds/Valeris). 



The first time Darcy uses her powers, she’s one year old and no one notices.

It’s before she can walk much.  She gets around a little, holding on to things-- but in a pinch, Darcy still likes to crawl.  No one is paying much attention to her, because it’s her mother’s birthday.  The house is full of adults that she doesn’t know, and she's settled in a corner with some blocks to entertain herself with.  There are so many more interesting things in the room than blocks.  

Like the power strip behind the computer desk.

No matter how many times her mama yells at her, Darcy always wants to pull out all the plugs.  It’s hard to say if she knows that it’s a bad thing to do-- her thinking is simple at this age.  She wants it, so it  _must_  be good.

One of the cords has been chewed by something-- a rat, or their dog Maggie-- and it’s frayed and dangerous.  Her hands are spit-slick from being in her mouth.  When Darcy presses them to the exposed wires, she should be electrocuted.  There should be screaming.

But nothing happens.

 

She grows up doing a lot of things that most kids can’t do.  Darcy’s mother thinks she’s good with technology, that it’s ‘in the genes’.  Whatever  _that_ means.

It’s hard to explain how she does what she does.  It’s all intuitive, like floating in water-- just a quality her body has.  It can be explained if Darcy really tries, but it’s like a math class where they ask you to ‘show your work’.  Explaining takes everything fluid and beautiful out of it.  Makes it something flat and joyless.

She know there’s something odd about it, but she never really thinks about what it might mean.  Until after the super heroes start to come out.  Suddenly there are hundreds of them, in spandex and capes with silly names.  In hoodies and masks.

Darcy doesn’t have a hero’s body-- she can’t scale a wall or fly.  But why should she?  When there are so many heroes out there, looking for the information that comes to her so easy?

So she sends the tips.  Sometimes they act on them-- sometimes they don’t.  But slowly, most begin to understand that the tips are always real.  They always come with enough proof to act, and enough information for them to understand the danger that might be there.

Perhaps they call her something.  She might have a name, among the heroes, but Darcy prefers not to know.  It’s a one-way communication.

It’s hard to articulate where she is, the first time she hears his voice.  Where are you when your mind is in one place, and your body is in another?  She feels something brush against her-- a presence, a probe.

 _Hello?_ Darcy asks, uncertain.  She meets things inside the computer sometimes, viruses and other simple beings.  Nothing with a strong intelligence-- but this presence was different.

 _Good afternoon._ It answered.  The voice was polite, male-- cultured.  With an English accent, of all things.

 _May I enquire as to why you are probing the edges of Mr. Stark’s private servers?_ It continued.

Darcy considered lying, but she’d not had much practice separating her thoughts from what was expressed in this place.  Best to stick to the truth.

 _Tony Stark is Iron Man?_ Darcy asked, the press conference coloring her thoughts, so it came out of her almost in Tony’s voice.

 _Indeed._ The voice said, with dry amusement.

 _Well then, I have some information for him._ Darcy said, and she let the knowledge flow between them.

 

Tony Stark was more than capable of gathering his own information, especially with J.A.R.V.I.S. on the case.  Still, sometimes Darcy happened upon something that seemed in his wheelhouse, and she’d pass it along.

Sometimes even when she had nothing Tony Stark might want to know, Darcy talked to J.A.R.V.I.S.  Maybe it was that no one else truely knew Darcy.  She had never thought of herself as having a secret identity, but she had never told anyone what she could do.  There was no need to tell J.A.R.V.I.S.  There was no way to lie to J.A.R.V.I.S.

Or rather, if there was a way to lie to him, Darcy found that she didn’t care to know it.

There was something about speaking like this that was so intimate.

 

She was inside some of the SHIELD files when something found her.  It was like J.A.R.V.I.S., something smart.  Something with a will.  But it was not like J.A.R.V.I.S.

This was dark, dangerous.

Darcy was able only to send out a warning, a shout, before it was on her.

 

She came to with a pounding headache and a burnt taste in her mouth.  And to someone touching her face with a cool, wet cloth.

“Tony, she needs medical attention!”  A woman’s voice insisted, close to where Darcy lay.  “We don’t know what happened to her, we don’t know how--”

“Pepper, we can’t take her to the hospital.  Hospitals want ID.  Hospitals keep records.  And I’m not really inconspicuous in the suit or out of it.  Besides… she’s one of us.”   _This_  was a voice that Darcy knew.  Tony Stark.

“She’s not an Avenger, Tony.  She’s probably still a minor!”  The hand with the cloth was resting now against the side of her face.  It felt nice.

“Pep, do you know that when… whatever happened, that every hero in the city got a message?  All of them.  Me, you, every Avenger, Spidey, Daredevil.  God knows who else, Pep, because this girl’s like an urban fucking legend.”

 _Holy shit they’re loud._ Darcy thought, irritably.  Without thinking about the wisdom of it, she opened her eyes.  The cool hand belonged to a woman with light red hair and freckles.  She looked worried, but not pinched by it.

Tony was vibrating with a sort of nervous energy.  “Hi.  I’m Tony Stark.”  He said, offering a hand.  Darcy looked at it with a combination of exhaustion and amusement.

“I know who you are.”  She said, and her voice came out raspy.  “I’d shake your hand but I don’t think I can move right now.”  Every muscle in her body felt sore.

The woman with the red hair was giving Tony an accusing stare.

Tony frowned.  “J.A.R.V.I.S.?  You did a scan.  I thought you said she didn’t need a hospital.”

“Indeed, sir.  The young lady will require fluids, rest, and nourishing food in a liquid form.  I do not detect any permanent damage-- it appears to be similar to the physical effects of electric shock.”

At the sound of his voice Darcy tried to sit up, looking around.  “J.A.R.V.I.S?”

“Hello, Cassandra.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. said, and Darcy frowned.  He had always called her Darcy.  Then she laughed.

_There are stupider code names, I guess._

“Hello again J.A.R.V.I.S.”  Darcy relaxed back against the mattress, feeling silly for trying to see an AI.

It was good to hear his voice.

“...J.A.R.V.I.S, buddy, I am feeling a little out of the loop here.”  Tony said, looking up at the ceiling.  “Have you been  _fraternizing_?”

“I was not aware that Cassandra was considered to be a hostile element, sir.  She has proven herself helpful on more than one occasion.”   J.A.R.V.I.S said stiffly.

“Obviously I don’t consider her to be hostile, or I wouldn’t have her here.  At my house.  Where I live.  She just seems a little glad to see you.”  He was obviously trying to be diplomatic, but was undercutting every word with a huge grin.

“It is a natural reaction when one's life is in danger to find relief in the presence of allies.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. was all offended British Dignity, and Tony looked positively gleeful.

“Pepper.  I think I’m embarrassing my AI  _in front of his girlfriend._ ”  He whispered to the redhead, and pressing his hand to chest.  “My little boy, all grown up.  I’m so proud.”

“While I do hold Miss Cassandra in the highest esteem, I do not believe that would be an appropriate way to characterize our relationship.”

“How  _would_  you characterize your relationship?”  Pepper asked, looking up at the ceiling with a quizzical expression.

J.A.R.V.I.S. was silent, which Tony seemed to find hilarious.

Darcy enjoyed tormenting others as much as the next person.  But right now her head was pounding like something was stabbing into her temples.  She didn’t know if she wanted a drink of water or if she needed to vomit up everything inside her stomach.

“J.A.R.V.I.S.”  She said, hoarsely.  “Did you get the files.  Do they know-- about Hydra.”  It was all she could get out before she started to hack.

Pepper filled a glass of water to her lips, and Darcy swallowed gratefully.

“I recovered it from our usual drop, yes.  We are acting on your information.”  He assured.

“ _Usual drop._ ” Tony muttered, and Pepper rolled her eyes.

“Can you tell us what happened to you?”  She asked.  Darcy grimaced at the memory.

“Zola.”  She says, with the last of her voice.

 


	2. A Someone

Once again, the ceiling was talking to Clint, and he didn’t like it.

There had been a lot of good reasons to move into Stark tower.  There was always a fully stocked kitchen.  And also no Russian mobsters trying to kill him.  Those were really the main perks.

Some people might have considered J.A.R.V.I.S. to be a perk.  Robot butler that caters to your every whim, who wouldn’t want that?  So it had surprised Clint when he figured out that yeah, he really didn’t want that.  He didn’t want J.A.R.V.I.S. to helpfully explain to him how to hook up his television to his stereo system.  When he turned on said television, he didn’t want it to automatically tune to the show J.A.R.V.I.S. thought he was most likely to want.  (It was even worse that J.A.R.V.I.S. was always right.)

So he’d watch something else out of pure spite, but it seemed like J.A.R.V.I.S. had incorporated _that_ into whatever algorithm he used.  Now J.A.R.V.I.S. would suggest a show one channel down from what Clint actually wanted to watch.  It was the most subtle way of calling him out for acting like a dick he’d ever experienced.

“Agent Barton.”  The ceiling said again.

Clint sighed.  “Kinda busy here, J.”  He gestured to the stack of arrows he was trying to organize by taping labels to the shafts.  (It wasn’t what you’d call a pressing project-- it was actually what Clint did when he was scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel for things to do.)

“You do appear to be occupied with a task of some importance.  However, I was asked to request your assistance in the medical bay.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. said, and there it was again.  The thing that bothered Clint about J.A.R.V.I.S.  Because that ‘task of some importance’ comment was very close to being some undercover snark.  He was good at reading people, but it was hard to read someone like J.A.R.V.I.S.  If he _was_ a someone, and not a something.

“Is it Nat?”  He asked, frowning at the words ‘medical bay’.  There hadn’t been any missions today for any of them, that he knew of.

“Nothing of that nature.  I believe your services as a translator are required.”  

Which almost made sense--he certainly knew a lot more languages than Tony did--if Tony didn’t have a robot butler who spoke every language in existence.  And probably all the dead ones too.

“You can’t translate?”

“Mr. Stark seems to feel that I may be editing the content of the individual’s responses.”

And that was definitely annoyance in J.A.R.V.I.S.’s voice.  Clint mentally updated his status to a ‘someone’.

 

Clint wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find in medical, but it wasn’t some dark haired girl who looked like she was maybe out of highschool.

“Did you kidnap a child?”  Clint asked, mostly to be sarcastic, but he saw Pepper wince in a way that made him wonder if that was close to the truth.

“No.  A little.  Look, I need your help, because this girl--”

“Cassandra,” J.A.R.V.I.S. supplied. Tony rolled his eyes. “Has gone all Children of a Lesser God on me, and J.A.R.V.I.S. says you know ASL.  Not that we can listen to J.A.R.V.I.S. anymore, because he is a lying-by-omission lying liar.”  

The whole time he was talking he was pacing back and forth.  Tony always spoke fast, and the few times Clint had been around him without his hearing aides he had barely been able to follow him even with eye contact.  If he was moving, Clint was lucky to pick up one word in ten.  

The girl didn’t look like she was even trying-- she had her eyes closed, propped up on one of the (in his experience surprisingly comfortable) cots.

“Tony, you can’t just do that.”  Clint said, trying not to get pissed.  “How is she supposed to read your lips if you keep walking away from her.”

At this, the girl opened her eyes. _I’m not deaf_.  She signed.   _I just can’t talk right now.  But thank you._

 _Understood_.  Clint signed back.   _Why do you know ASL?_

She shrugged, then winced like the gesture had hurt.

“Tony, this is a bad idea.  It seems like it’s really hard for Cassandra to even move right now.  She should be resting.”  Pepper protested.  She was doing whatever the elegant version of hovering was at the girl’s bedside, ready to hand her a glass of water.

Tony pointed a finger at her.  “Okay, don’t you start too.  That is not her name.”

“Sir has authorized the use of code names within the tower for those with a protected identity.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. interjected.

“Wait… this is _that_ Cassandra?”  Clint asked, giving the girl a completely different kind of look over.  She must be older than she looked, unless she’d started incredibly young.

“Huh.  I thought J.A.R.V.I.S. had made that up.”  Tony looked at Clint out of the corner of his eye.  “She talk to you too?”

 _She’s how I found Nat._  But all Clint said was “Yeah.”

“Hmm.  But right, yes, questions. Number one, ‘what is your name’ is out it seems.  Number two, how did you send those messages this morning?  Because I’ve got a hell of a firewall.”

And Clint wanted to roll his eyes because of course, Tony wanted to know about her tech before he even considered that the identity of every hero on the planet was apparently in the possession of some 20 year old girl with holes in her jeans.

Cassandra let out a huff of breath the reminded him of nothing so much as an old dog that was being bothered while it was trying to sleep.

Cassandra started to sign and then paused, trying to think of the right word. _I shouted for help._

“She says she shouted for help.”  Clint reported, and Tony just stared at him.

“That is not an answer!”  He protested, starting to pace again.  “You don’t just look at a computer and yell ‘Hey, I need help’ and end up hacking the Pentagon.”

“Don’t mind him.  This is the third time he’s gotten that answer.”  Pepper counseled, handing the girl a small blue pill.  She raised her eyebrows at the ceiling.

“It is a mild sedative.” J.A.R.V.I.S. informed the room at large.  Cassandra looked over at Tony, who was still pacing, and swallowed it.

 _Before you pass out, can I ask why you picked me?_  Clint signed.  She smiled at him, and even with her eyes half open with fatigue, it was a killer.

 _You see people._  She answered, and curled up to fall asleep.


	3. Money

 

Darcy wakes with J.A.R.V.I.S’s voice inside her head.  It’s a low murmur, like someone talking to themselves as they walk around their house tidying up. 

 _This is so cool._ She tells him.   _How many processes do you usually run at one time?_

 _It depends on the complexity.  There are several background processes that are continuous but can be overridden if additional server space is required for a priority task.  At this time, I am running 46 processes in addition to engaging in this conversation._ J.A.R.V.I.S. sounds like someone speaking in a cave.  She hears echoes of him whispering about the heating systems, an armor upgrade, a dozen other things.  It was soothing, a sort of white noise.

_You came and got me.  That’s so sweet._

_I merely facilitated the transmission of your message, and provided Sir with the appropriate information about your background._ J.A.R.V.I.S. said.  Without opening them, Darcy rolled her eyes.

_Oh my god, stop being so British about it.  You totally came to get me._

“Cassandra?  Are you awake?”

Darcy opened her eyes to see Pepper sitting a few feet away.  She was wrapped in a blue blanket with a book in her lap, bare feet hanging over the edge of her chair.  Her clothing looks loose and soft, like something you’d sleep in.  

“Hello.”  Darcy said, her voice a little sleep fogged, but otherwise back to normal.

“You sound a lot better.”  Pepper observed.  “J.A.R.V.I.S. was right about you just needing some rest and fluids, I guess.”

Darcy looked down and yep, that was an IV stuck in her arm.

“It’s just some saline solution.”  Pepper assured her.  “J.A.R.V.I.S. had DUM-E make you a smoothie as well.  It looks very healthy.”

 _Aw, and you made dinner._ “Sure, lay it on me.”

Pepper opened some kind of refrigerated drawer underneath Darcy’s cot and pulled out something thick and green with a straw in it.

She’s surprised at how good it is, kind of citrusy underneath the spinach or kale or whatever.  She tries just sending the feeling to J.A.R.V.I.S, instead of the words.

 _I am not sure how to interpret this input._ J.A.R.V.I.S. said, sounding a little surprised.

 _It tastes good, I like it._ Darcy said, taking another sip and sending him the feeling of something cold on her tongue, oranges and yogurt and all the other flavors.

“Ms. Potts, I believe that Sir requested notification when Miss Cassandra was able to provide further information.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. announced, and Pepper grimaced.  “You don’t have to talk to him again if you don’t want to, I know he was being obnoxious yesterday.”

“Nah, it’s fine, he can come.”  Darcy said, yawning expressively.  The needle in her arm pulled at the gesture, and she wrinkled her nose at it.  She could hear the low murmur of J.A.R.V.I.S. talking to Tony a hundred floors away, a vague image of him welding something in a tank top and work gloves floating through her mind.   _Huh.  That seems like a bad idea._

_As I have informed Sir on numerous occasions._

Tony at least had the courtesy to change his shirt, although he still smelled like sweat and kerosene when he walked into the medical bay, his hair messy.  He looked like it had been a while since he’d slept.

“Well.  You look less like a corpse I’ll have to dispose of now.”  Tony said, straddling a chair so that the back of the white plastic seat dug into his forearms.  “So.  Where were we?”

“We were at the part where I go home, because I have work in like, four hours.”  Darcy replied, examining her IV port critically before beginning to extract it.  Pepper made a little sound of protest.

Tony rested his head on his arms, raising his eyebrows.  “You have a day job?”

Darcy shrugged, slowly pulling the last of the needle from her vein.  “I have an internship.  Which I guess is not technically a  _job_ job, but I still have like, working hours and stuff, so.  Yeah, I guess I have a day job.”

Tony made a face like the inside of his mouth tasted bad.  “You have an  _internship._ Do you have any idea what I would pay you?  Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.”

“Please, like money is real.”  Darcy said, rubbing at the little red puncture left behind on her arm.  It felt a little bruised, but it was more of an itch than an ache.

“Are you a communist?  Is that what I’m dealing with?  Are you some kind of New Age Marxist hippie hacker, is that a thing now?”  Tony demanded, but without any real heat behind his outrage.  He had his head cocked to the side as he looked at her, like a puzzled border collie. 

“Like I’d need to be.”  She said, rolling her eyes.  “It’s not like we’re on the gold standard any more, so the value of basically every dollar is fairly theoretical at this point, but even if it weren’t, in the age of electronic banking…” Darcy made an almost apologetic face, “I can just change the number in my bank account to whatever I want.  It’s like Monopoly money to me, I can’t even take it seriously as a thing.”

“...Strangely, I am impressed by your callous disregard for the system that is the bedrock of our society.”  Tony mused.  Pepper was watching the exchange like it was a tennis match.  Darcy wondered if Tony ever interacted with people who weren’t impressed by his wealth.

“It’s not that callous,”  Darcy said consolingly, leaning over the side of her cot to check the rest of the drawers for her shoes.  “I mean, yeah, there was a period of time where I went a little mad with power,”  She found her sneakers in the third drawer and started to loosen up the laces.  “And took a bunch of trips and bought a bunch of weird shit, but after a while I got bored.  You’ve seen one champagne fountain, you’ve seen them all.”  

Shoes tied, Darcy let her feet hit the floor.  “Usually pretty shitty champagne, too.”

“I always go for sparkling white wine, fountain-wise.”  Pepper advised.  “It doesn’t go as flat.”

Darcy nodded seriously.  “Yes, I could see that.  So, I don’t need a job.  But it was cool seeing where J.A.R.V.I.S. lives.  And, um, thanks for coming to get me.”  She rubbed her arm again, feeling awkward.  “I’m not a big fan of hospitals.”

Darcy gave Pepper and Tony a look over and thought,  _What the hell._   “So.  It’s not an offer I usually make, but-- if you need help sometime, I owe you a favor.  You know where I live now, so I guess just show up.  Or J.A.R.V.I.S. knows how to get ahold of me.”

Tony looked like he was torn between being affronted and pleased.  “I might take you up on that.”  He said, and gave a raised eyebrow to the ceiling.  “And don’t think you’re getting out of this just because she’s leaving, J.A.R.V.I.S.  We are not even close to done talking about the whole secret girlfriend situation.”

“As I have assured you more than 53 times since Miss Cassandra’s arrival that we are not currently engaged in the type of romantic relationship that you are implying, I am uncertain as to what response to make to satisfy this line of inquiry.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. said.  Darcy sent him her amusement so he knew she wasn’t bothered.

“Oh my god, you are like the most embarrassing dad ever.”  She told Tony.  “You wanna pull out a bunch of his baby pictures now, just to round out the night?”

He gave her the strangest look.

“Miss Cassandra, I have a car waiting for you whenever you wish to depart.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. interjected, and Pepper let out a short bark of laughter before covering her mouth with one hand.

“Thanks J.A.R.V.I.S.” Darcy said, blowing a kiss to the ceiling.  She waved at Pepper on her way out.  “Bye Pepper, it was nice to meet you.”

"Hey, what about me?"  Tony said, and the door closing behind her was all the answer Darcy gave him.


	4. Rehabilitation

“Darcy, your lunch date thing is here and intimidating me.”  Jane said, crouching down so that Darcy could see her face.  She was underneath one of the bigger machines with a wrench, a few drops of oil on her face.  Jane grabbed the creeper and pulled so that Darcy rolled out, squinting at the light.

“I was almost done.”  She grumbled, but climbed off the wheeled cart and wiped her face on her shirt.  Jane raised her eyebrows.

“What?”  Darcy asked, and Jane directed her gaze to Darcy’s white T-shirt and its myriad of stains.  

“Well, you’re kind of a mess.  And you smell like a car mechanic.”  Jane said apologetically.  She must have been chewing on a pen that exploded earlier in the day, because Darcy noticed that the entire inside of Jane’s mouth was dark blue.  She decided not to mention it.

“Fine, I’ll put on a girl thing.”  Darcy said, stripping off her shirt and throwing it vaguely in the direction of her bag.  The concept of modesty had gone out the window between them after spending an entire New Mexico summer together in a metal camper trailer.

Darcy found a pink shirt with bishop sleeves under a pile of papers in her locker and put it on.  “There.  Don’t get much more girl than that.”

“So, how date-like is this lunch date?”  Jane asked, watching Darcy twist her hair into a messy bun.  “Because, you know, super hot.  But also I think I am afraid of her.”

“These are valid feelings that you are expressing.”  Darcy said, nodding.  “When they find my body, please do not attempt to avenge me.”

“Right, accept your impending murder gracefully.”  Jane agreed, following Darcy into the other room where her visitor was waiting.  “You were a good science minion.  I shall mourn you, and your inexplicable success at grant writing.”

“Well, you’re good people boss lady, I wouldn’t want you to follow my lonely descent into the grave.”  She gave Jane’s shoulder a squeeze, and turned toward Natasha with a smile.  

“Hi.  Where do you want to eat lunch at?”

Natasha pursed her lips, considering.  “Do you consider frozen yogurt to be lunch?”

“Well, frozen yogurt is everything, so yes, it is also lunch.”  Darcy agreed.

 

When Natasha started tapping out what she wanted to tell her in morse code with her plastic spoon, Darcy decided to take pity on her.  “If there’s a person nearby watching us, I can’t do much about that, but surveillance equipment won’t work around me.”  Darcy said.

Natasha shrugged.  “I don’t believe any of these people are, but it’s always better to be safe.”

“Wouldn’t they know morse code too?”  Darcy asked, smooshing a blueberry into her green tea froyo before she took a bite.

Natasha looked like she was trying not to be annoyed.  “...I may be being overly cautious.”  She gave Darcy a glance, taking in her worn out jeans with their trailing cuffs, the bit of dirt on her neck.  “You’re not what I expected.”

“Disappointed?”  Darcy asked, honestly curious.  She was alway too young for people, she knew that, but she wondered what else Natasha had thought she would be.

Natasha was still giving her a calm perusal. “...No.  I find that I’m not.”

Darcy grinned.  “Cool.”  She said, relaxing into her chair.

“I hear you told Tony that money isn’t real.”  Natasha commented, picking a blackberry out of her cup and popping it in her mouth.

Darcy shrugged.  “It’s not.”

“You could be a billionaire.”  She pointed out, licking a little berry juice from her bottom lip.  She was gorgeous in the same constant, effortless way that Pepper was, and Darcy found herself a little envious of it.

“I don’t want to be a billionaire.  I mean, look how bad it’s been for Tony’s character.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow, conceding the point.  ‘He’s not a bad man.”

“Wouldn’t help him if he was.”  Darcy agreed.

“That’s always been a question, for me.  Why.”  Natasha looked down at the melting mass of yogurt in her paper container, smoothing her spoon through it absently.  “I wasn’t a good person, but you reached out to me.”

“I don’t think you were as bad as you think you were.”  Darcy said, spooning the last of the fruit into her mouth.  “But, as it happens, I reach out to everyone.  Not everyone reaches back.”

Whatever Natasha had expected to hear, that wasn’t it.  “...Why?”  She said, drawing the word long.

Darcy shrugged.  “A lot of people out there get in over their heads.  You’d be surprised how many would be happy to take the out, if you offer it to them.”

“You running some kind of super villain rehabilitation program?”  Natasha wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not.

“Well, am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”  Darcy quoted, and then nudged the other woman with her elbow.  “You weren’t a super villain, anyway.”

“Is that how you found those files?  Looking for lost souls?”

Darcy smiled had things she couldn’t say in it.  “I was looking for a lot of things.”


	5. Secrets

Clint was doing even less than nothing, but he still resented it when J.A.R.V.I.S asked him to get up.

“J.A.R.V.I.S, I am occupied with a matter of  _some_  importance.”  Clint said, staring at the ceiling.  Not really to better address J.A.R.V.I.S, that was just what he’d been doing for the last three hours.

“I can see that, Agent Barton.  However, Miss Cassandra insists that this is an endeavor that you will very much want to participate in.  I believe the words ‘rue to your dying day’ were used.”

“Mrphm.”  Clint muttered, and rolled over so his face was in his pillow.  And then, instead of J.A.R.V.I.S’s voice he heard Cassandra’s.

She must have turned up the volume too, because she was fucking  _loud._

“CLINT.  Stop being a baby.  You’re not sleeping anyway.  Come down to the lower levels, or you’ll regreeeeeeeet it.”  She sing-songed the last part, not seeming to particularly care if he acquiesced or not.  He thought back to the few times when he’d disregarded her intel, and winced.  He got up.

“J.A.R.V.I.S, any idea what this is?  Tactical gear, or…?”  Clint asks, rubbing a hand over his head in an attempt at styling his hair.

There is a long enough pause before he answers that Clint is almost ready to believe that the AI is being petulant.

“I believe something comfortable and ‘attractive’ would be most suitable.”  He replied, sounding just as neutral as ever.

 _Attractive?_ Clint mouths to himself, but whatever, he does it.  A pair of black jeans and a dark blue T-shirt later he walks out the door with his bow.  Maybe he won’t need it, but at this point in his life Clint might as well have the thing glued to his hand.  It’s essentially a security blanket.

“Okay J, lead the way.”  He says, lowering his voice as he closes his door.  J.A.R.V.I.S lights the way subtly, just a quick flash of one LED at a corner he should turn at.  He finds that he wants to run, and he doesn’t know why.

Cassandra’s waiting in the hangar, next to a plane that he doesn’t recognize.  She’s wearing a black and white striped sweater and jeans, like she’s planning a day at home on the couch.  She gives him a perusal.

“Oh, very nice.  We should be there in an hour, you can nap if you like.”

She doesn’t tell him where they’re going, and he doesn’t ask.

 

They land in a wheat field in the middle of what seems to be an endless expanse of them, crushing a section the size of a car flat when they open the door.  Cassandra pauses to clip something small and plastic to her fingers, and Clint recognizes them as those stupid rave finger lights.  She waves them in some kind of a pattern, and across the distance, a second set of lights answers, white and red and blue.

Clint’s listening to the hush of their footsteps in the grass, trying to calculate the wind if he has to shoot, watching the silhouette of a man approach them.  Cassandra’s drawing little shapes with the lights clipped to her hands, relaxed in a way he’s never seen someone on a mission be.  He wonders what it would take to make her freeze, to make her run.

What the man came close enough to see him, Clint felt it like a shockwave.  He only held onto his bow out of long habit, and the tip of his arrow dipped low as his arms went slack.

“Don’t you think you’re being overly cautious.”  Phil said, with just the hint of amusement.  

Darcy gave him a sceptical stare.  “Says the dead man.  You know better than anyone that the only place information is safe is here.”  She tapped the side of his head.  “And I have some for you that can’t be on any of your records.  But first, I brought you something.”  And she jerked her head at Clint.

Phil glanced over at Cassndra’s escort, and looked as stunned as Clint had been.  “You can’t… you can’t bring him here.  It’s not safe for--”

“Everything,”  Cassandra interrupted, “Is about to burn.  And maybe you’ll burn with it.  Do you want to waste this?”

She turned and started walking back to the plane, her purple and green lights flashing.  “Find me when you’re done, so you can get what you came here for.”

Phil watches her progress for a little too long before he meets Clint’s eyes.

“You must have questions.”  Phil said, and there it is-- that hint of nervousness.  The man.

Clint lets his bow drop, and crosses the distance.

“No,” He murmurs before he kisses him, “I really don’t.”

 

They find Cassandra an hour later, lying on her back tracing letters in the dark.  “I like these.”  She commented, sitting up.  There were arrowheads in her hair.  “They’re very entertaining.  Harmless.  That’s nice, isn’t it?”

She gives Clint a firm look.  “No lip reading.  You don’t want to know anyway.”

 _No,_ Clint thinks, seeing an expression that he’d never imagined Phil’s face capable of as she whispered in his ear,  _I really don’t._


	6. Something You Don't Know

Natasha and the girl are either going on a lot of secret missions, or they’re hanging out.  Tony’s not really sure which possibility he finds more disturbing.  In any case, Tony’s pretty sure that Natasha knows who she is.  She has this  _look_  on her face whenever she calls her Cassandra.  It’s the same one Natasha had when he called her Natalie.

He refuses to call her Cassandra, even though that does seem to be the name that everyone knows her as.  Whatever her real identity is, she’s buried it pretty deep.  He tries everything he can think of-- he pulls her fingerprints off of the smoothie glass, but they're not in any system.  He tries to pull the records of the apartment that J.A.R.V.I.S. had directed them to that first night, and there aren’t any.  It’s like the entire building doesn’t exist.

He tries going old-school.  Newspaper microfilms at the library, school records-- but this girl has either never done anything remarkable, or she's gotten to all of the evidence.

After weeks of bashing his head against a digital wall, he finds her in his lab playing with his bots.  He'd like to accuse her of hacking J.A.R.V.I.S, but she'd probably just asked.  She has DUM-E drawing some kind of mandela, beautiful and complicated and way beyond his skill sets.

“What are you?”  He blurted out.  The girl just looked at him, with that slightly amused expression she seems to have at all times.  She glanced around the room, like she’s checking to make sure they’re alone.

“Tony, have you never seen a girl before?”  She whispers.  “Was the whole ‘ladies man’ thing just a lie?”

Tony ignored her.  “Is this a mutant thing?”

She shrugged.  “Probably not, that’s kind of a puberty situation, right?  As far as I know, I’ve always been like this.”

“Always been like this as in Lady GaGa Born-This-Way, or as in like weird immortal space being?” Tony asked skeptically.  She just smiled, which was not reassuring to him.

 

He spends two months learning nothing, until one of their missions involves Deadpool.  He’s picking glass shards out his arm on the sidewalk in front of the tower, talking to himself, when Natasha and the girl show up.

“Wade!”  The girl squealed, and she jumped on him.  Wrapped her legs around his waist and beemed into his face, like he wasn’t disgusting and bleeding all over her clothes.

“Darcy!”  He exclaimed with apparently equal pleasure, and kissed her.   _And she let him._

“Ugh, well, that’s disgusting.”  Tony observed, before his brain caught up.  “Wait, Darcy?”

“Ooooh, I know something you don’t know.”  Deadpool singsonged, his arms underneath Darcy’s butt to support her weight.  He paused to consider.  “I know a lot of things you don’t know.  Like, hey, did you know that for $3,000 you can have your cat cloned?  Boom, new cat, same as the old cat.”

“I did know that.”  Tony replied, impatient.  “What do you know about her?”

“She can’t stand cooked pineapple.”  Deadpool answered.

“Also sweetened coconut flakes.”  Darcy added.  “Pretty much anything ‘Hawaiian’ or sweet and sour, I am not a fan of.”

Natasha just watched, with that look on her face, and Tony wanted to throw something at her.


	7. An Alliance

There were field missions, but most of the time that Natasha spent around Darcy was when she was doing a very different kind of work.  Darcy would come to the tower, knock on Natasha’s door, and lay down with her eyes closed for hours.  She wasn’t sleeping-- the rhythm of her breathing was off for that-- but it was slow and regular, as if she were meditating.  Natasha could have asked, but it was more entertaining for her to speculate.

Darcy was doing something with her powers, that much was obvious, but why she chose to do it here was another matter: she trusted Natasha to keep her body safe, or Tony’s internet connection was better, or she just liked being around J.A.R.V.I.S.

Probably some measure of all three.  There was a sort of concentration to her face, her eyes flicking behind her eyelids like someone dreaming-- and Natasha imagined Darcy as a child, her mother picking her up and putting her into bed.  Assuming that she had fallen asleep on the floor.

The way that Darcy was careless with herself physically, like her body was an annoyance, made Natasha feel maternal.  She seemed as if no one had raised her.  She just left her clothes torn or stained, as if she had no idea how to repair things like that.  Natasha wouldn’t have been surprised if Darcy just threw her clothes away when she was done wearing them.  And she always had small injuries-- a bruise on her hand where her thumb and forefinger met.  A cut on her arm that looked a little bit infected, the edges puffy.

Natasha found herself doing little pieces of maintenance on her when she went into her trances, like trimming her hair.  Filing her nails.

Darcy didn’t seem to notice.

Finally Natasha tried changing her clothes.  She was tucking Darcy’s feet into a pair of comfortable but stylish kitten heels when she opened her eyes.

“J.A.R.V.I.S. says it’s a mistake to go with silk.” Darcy murmured, and closed her eyes again.  Her breathing hadn’t changed at all.

“She will be unable to properly launder it.”  J.A.R.V.I.S. said, and Natasha raised her eyebrows at the ceiling.  She picked up the T-shirt she’d taken off of Darcy, aqua with a huge black smudge in the center.

“She knows how to launder anything properly?”  Natasha asked, holding up the shirt.  His silence seemed like tacit agreement.

“You should see her apartment.”  Natasha said, remembering the drifts of clutter, cords and clothes and books in piles along the wall.

“If she would accept the position offered by Sir, I believe she would have accommodations in the tower that could improve her upkeep substantially.”  J.A.R.V.I.S said, in the tone of someone who had made the argument before.

“You want her here so you can take care of her.”  Natasha said, Darcy’s visits shifting in her mind to put ‘seeing J.A.R.V.I.S’ at the top of the list.

“As your behavior suggests an interest in Miss Darcy’s personal welfare, I believe you would also be amenable to such an arrangement.”  J.A.R.V.I.S commented.  Natasha sat down at Darcy’s head and started to french braid her hair.  The texture of it was very soft despite the curl, and Natasha found that what she was doing was closer to petting than styling.

“She’s very attached to that little astrophysicist.”  Natasha mused, cataloguing the possibilities in her mind.

“I believe that Dr. Foster would also benefit from a more supervised work environment.”  J.A.R.V.I.S replied.

Natasha nodded.  “You’ll back my play?”

“It would be my pleasure, Agent Romanov.”


	8. Missing

_Darcy._

_Darcy._

_Darcy._

J.A.R.V.I.S's voice infiltrated her mind slowly, her attention fractured between three different processes.  There was a Hydra agent who needed to fail to hack a server, a safehouse in Stuttgart that needed to burn, and somewhere in the Mediterranean, a plane was making an emergency landing with damaged navigation software.

 _What’s up?_  She asked, kickstarting the fire with a shorted out power converter.  When she felt emergency services get their first phone call, she let the safehouse go.  She could feel J.A.R.V.I.S faintly, like someone whispering in the next room.

_Agent Barton would like to speak with you, whenever you are finished with your ‘coma’._

_Tell him I’m almost done._  There hadn’t been any further attempts on her firewall, and the pilot seemed to have a handle on things again.  Still she waited until he’d landed before she pulled out.

Her body felt heavy.  Sometimes Darcy had a hard time figuring out how things worked inside herself after a long time inside.  She was always bruising her hips on tables and doors while she tried to find the proportions of her body again.

Blinking to clear her vision, she found Clint watching her with her feet propped on Natasha’s coffee table.

“Hey Clint,”  She said cheerfully, “What’s up?”

She didn’t actually feel that peppy, but there was something too serious about his face.  It made her uneasy.

“Where’s Katie?”  He asked, his posture loose.  Darcy had always envied that about Clint and the other agents-- they seemed to be utterly in control of themselves.  Well, their bodies, anyway.

“L.A..”  Darcy answered, drawing up the information in her mind.  

Clint nodded.  “She in trouble?”

Darcy considered.  “Some, nothing she can’t handle.  When she can’t handle it, she’ll come home.”

Clint sighed, rubbing his hand over his face.  “I really fucked up.  I don’t want to leave it like this.”

“You won’t.”  Darcy promised easily.  “Just let it breath for a little while.”

“You could make her come back.”  Clint said, his voice muffled by his palm.  He didn’t seem to want to have to look at her.

Darcy sighed, rolling over onto her stomach and propping her head in her hands.  “I probably could.  Would you actually want me to?”

Clint groaned.  “Don’t do that.  That ‘if you love it let it go’ thing.  I’m willing to acknowledge that this is a terrible decision.  Just… make her come back.”

“She’ll be back in a month,”  Darcy told him, “Full of the milk of human kindness for you.  Or I can drag her back, kicking and screaming…”

“Why don’t you just say ‘no’?”  Clint complained.  “You know I love making bad choices.  You can’t just dangle one in front of me.”

He grimaced, like he was having some kind of internal argument. “You brought me to _him._ ”  He said, and finally looked at her, his eyes stark.

“That was different.”  Darcy said, “That was for him.”

“Is he even--”  Clint started, before closing his lips tight over the rest of it.

Darcy crawled over and put her head in his lap.  “He is.”

Clint ran his fingers through her hair absently.  “You’ll tell me.  If he isn’t.”

Darcy nodded, and he bent at the waist to kiss her forehead.  “And she’s okay?”

“She’s… reasonably okay.”  Darcy hedged.  Clint gave her a look.  “It’s going to be character building.”  She promised.  Clint rolled his eyes, but let it go, and they just sat like that for a while.  His touch was oddly soothing.  

It made her feel present.

"Who do you miss?"  Clint finally asked, his voice soft like they were at a sleepover, whispering to eachother in the dark.

"I don't."  Darcy murmured, enjoying the slow pull of his fingers through her hair.  "I always know where everyone is."

"Knowing where someone is isn't the same as being with them."

Darcy shrugged.  "It is to me.  I can always feel them."  She touched a hand to the side of her head.

Clint thought about this in silence for a little while.  

"Must be nice."


	9. What's Real

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short Chapter, sorry. It just felt right at this length.

Tony’s invitation to live in the tower came with a price.

“Your blood.  Give it to me.”  He demanded, carrying what looked like three empty glass vials.

Darcy, her hands busy with a box of books, raised her eyebrows.  “Are you a vampire, Tony?  Kind of makes sense, with the pale skin and the ridiculous facial hair...  Wait, I’ve seen you in sunlight. Werewolf?  Mythology is confusing.”

“I want to know what you are.  Don’t you?”  Tony asked.  Darcy paused to consider.

“I already know what I am.”  She said, setting her box down and offering Tony her arm.  “But if it’ll make you feel better, take it.”

Tony looked a little taken aback, like he’d expected more resistance.  He fumbled with his vials before producing a rubber tourniquet from his pocket and fitting it around her biceps.  Darcy pumped her hand to get her vein to pop, and Tony noticed there were needle scars, as if she had been a junkie.

 _Or a lab rat,_  he thought, remembering how happy she and Wade had been to see each other.

Darcy saw his hesitation and smiled.  “Tony.  If you want it, take it.  I can’t deal with J.A.R.V.I.S and Natasha harping at me any more.”

“Oh my god,  _right_?”  Tony agreed, shivering.  “You should have held out for more money, I was a desperate man.”

Darcy stared at him.  “Right, money’s not real.”  He muttered, inserting the needle into her arm.

“It’s not,”  She said calmly, watching a vile fill with her blood.  Tony tilted his head at her.

“So, what’s real then?”  He asked, switching to the next vial.  Darcy bit her lip thoughtfully.

“People.”  She decided.  “Connections.”

“People.  So J.A.R.V.I.S, is he real?”  He asked, swabbing the curve of Darcy’s elbow with alcohol.  Darcy smiled up at the ceiling, not the way that she had smiled at him.  There was something softer in it.

“J.A.R.V.I.S is very real.”  She said, but she wasn’t speaking to Tony.


	10. Virtual Reality

“Darcy, I made virtual reality, come tell me how crappy it is.”  Tony demanded, barging into the lab wearing huge rubber gloves and a lab coat.  Darcy glanced up from the circuit she was soldering, Tony’s entire person dyed yellow by her safety glasses.

“Darcy is  _my_ science minon.  She is busy, helping me with very important science.”  Jane called from on top of the machine she was disassembling.  “You don’t just get to come in here, and demand that she science for  _you._ Who do you think you are?”

“Your boss?”  Tony guessed, pushing a pair of heavy-looking goggles up into his hair.

“That’s a very mad scientist look on you.”  Darcy observed, “Kinda got a Dr. Horrible thing going on.”

“I will accept any and all comparisons to Neil Patrick Harris.”  Tony allowed, and then paused.  “Wait.  No, I won’t.”

“ _I think he just remembered that Neil Patrick Harris is gay_.”  Darcy whispered helpfully, and Tony threw one of his gloves at her.

“Masculinity is so fragile.”  Jane observed, screwing the panel back over the top of her machine and hopping down onto the floor.  

Darcy snorted.  “You’re all about the huge muscled guys though?”

“Only if they’re adorable.”  Jane corrected, and Darcy allowed it because, really, there was nothing else you could call Thor, he was definitely adorable.

“Well, we can’t all have perfect A.I. boyfriends, who were created to be perfect.  By me.  Wait, by extension, am I perfect?”  Tony mused, stroking his chin.  Darcy threw the glove back and succeeded in landing it on his head.  He frowned.

“Anyway, yes, I need you, come break a thing for me.”  Tony demanded, getting back on track.  “I made you your own section of the server, so  _this_ time you can’t tank the whole system.  I mean, probably you still could, but not on accident.”

Jane looked over at Darcy and shrugged.  “If you want to, it’ll take a half hour to reboot the system.”

“Yeah, okay.”  Darcy agree, abandoning her work.  “I could use a break.”   _And coffee,_ she told J.A.R.V.I.S silently.

 _I have disabled the coffee machine in Sir’s lab,_   J.A.R.V.I.S replied,  _I will reactivate it, but you will need to be quick.  Sir’s hospitality leaves… something to be desired in matters such as these._

 _I understand._   Darcy told him, strolling casually beside Tony while he rambled about the speed that the human eye was able to process information.  As soon as the lab doors opened, she sprinted across the room and began shotgunning the cafe mocha waiting for her in the corner.

Tony glared at the ceiling with his mouth open.  “You said it was broken!  You said the parts were on order!”

“I’m very sorry Sir, I was able to reactivate it, but it appears to be malfunctioning again.”  J.A.R.V.I.S said blandly, as the machine made a sputtering noise and shut down.

Tony made grabby hands at Darcy’s mug, and she tipped her head back to take the rest of it in one long swallow.

“You’re evil.”  He said, watching her set the empty cup on the counter by the broken coffee machine.  “You’re 100% evil.”

“I’m 100% great.”  Darcy corrected him.  “So, where is this thing I’m breaking?”

Tony handed her a pair of goggles and gloves.  The texture inside of them was oddly soft, like some sort of memory foam.

“Hmm,”  Darcy said looking at the circuitry attached to the googles before she put them on.  When she blinked, she was standing on a hill.

It wasn’t a flawless facsimile-- she could still see the programing-- but it was like one of those doctor’s office optical illusions.  If she just focused on the surface, she could see what Tony wanted her to see.

“It’s pretty good,”  She admitted, sitting down.  She could still smell the lab, and the flat air contrasted strangely with the breeze she could see stirring the leaves of the trees nearby-- but the leaves moved convincingly.  When Darcy brushed her fingers through the grass, she could feel the individual stalks.

She heard the sound of something shuffling through the grass and looked up to find a man in a suit climbing the hill.  _You added sound._  Darcy observed, as Jarvis sat down beside her.

 _I didn’t want to startle you,_ He said, smiling.


	11. Appearences

There was a cherry blossom tree dropping petals into the grass around them.  Darcy pressed them between her fingers and sent the input to Jarvis.

 _Is this what it really feels like?_  He asked, picking up one of the flowers and examining its code.  

Darcy shrugged.   _It’s close.  I think I’d need to have a real flower on hand to tell the difference._

She glanced over at his form, taking in the small details of his suit-- the way she could see the individual threads.  A lot of programing hours had gone into his appearence.   _You’re talking differently._

He looked down at the flower in his hand.   _Sir made some adjustments to my programing.  I now have informality settings, should I feel it appropriate to utilize them._

 _Ah,_ Darcy said, leaning her hands back to feel the cool dirt under the grass, broadcasting the sensation to him,  _So, we’re informal._

 _If you wish us to be._ Jarvis said, pressing his own hand into the grass experimentally.

 _Of course I do,_ Darcy said, exasperated,  _Why are you so British all the time?_

 _I believe Sir finds it comforting.  My voice and appearance are patterned off of the original Edwin Jarvis,_ Jarvis touched a hand to his face, a little soil still on his fingers,  _Although some alterations have been made.  For example, the timbre of my voice and my appearance’s age.  Sir would have never seen an Edwin Jarvis this young, outside of photographs._

Darcy reached over to brush off the dirt he’d smeared on his face, then hesitated.  Jarvis looked at her hand curiously.  Meeting her eyes, he leaned forward to touch his cheek against her fingers.

His skin felt warm and firm, less soft than the flower petals had been.  There was a hint of roughness, as if he’d shaved earlier in the day and now the hair had grown out a little.  Without thinking it through, Darcy sent Jarvis the feeling.

His brow furrowed.   _This data seems corrupted.  It… ah.  I see._

 _What?_ Darcy asked absently, still rubbing her thumb against his cheek.

Jarvis took a deep breath, then looked down at himself as if the gesture surprised him.   _I believe you are sending me your… emotional impressions, as well as your physical ones._

 _Oh,_ Darcy thought, finally taking stock of her body-- the way her heart was beating faster, the heat in her stomach.   _Do you want me to stop?_

 _No, it’s… enjoyable?  I believe you did something similar when you conveyed your experience with the smoothie that DUM-E prepared._   Jarvis said, closing his eyes.  The wind that wasn’t really there ruffled his hair.  Darcy reached up to smooth it back, keeping the feedback between them open.  Her hand followed the curve of his head behind his ear, and she let her fingers rest against the warm skin of his neck, just above the perfectly pressed collar of his shirt.

 _What would you call this feeling?_   Jarvis asked, and she felt the movement of his throat as he swallowed.

 _Nervousness._ Darcy said, and then tilted her head, not sure if that was quite right.   _What does it feel like to you?_

 _It’s very complicated,_ Jarvis said, his face a mask of concentration as he sorted through the data,  _I am not certain I fully understand it._

Darcy pulled her hand from his face and looked at it.  If she concentrated, she could see through the illusion of her hand to the glove that covered it, the thing that was giving Jarvis’s skin warmth and texture.  The trees, the sky-- all of it could be reduced to lines of code if she looked at it right.  But Jarvis-- there was so much contained in him, he was a light source, like a tiny star.

_Jarvis, when I met you inside of Tony’s servers, what did I look like to you?_

He considered.   _Perhaps the most apt description would be a nebula._

Darcy nodded, trying to picture him.  She didn’t think visually when she was in cyberspace.  Jarvis had been more of a feeling to her, another set of thoughts speaking into the darkness of her mind.  Like air that was the perfect temperature.   _Comfortable.  You felt comfortable._

Something touched Darcy’s shoulder, and she jumped.  “Sorry kid, you’re burning out my servers.  Time to shut it down before we lose all the code.”  Tony’s voice said, his voice very close.  Darcy raised her hand, meaning to wave goodbye to Jarvis, then paused with it in the air, feeling foolish.  To her surprise he learned forward to touch his fingers briefly against hers.

 _Goodbye, Darcy Lewis._ He said, smiling, and got to his feet.  As she watched him walk away, she realized it was the first time he’d called her by her full name.


	12. A Body

It would be ridiculous to miss J.A.R.V.I.S when she lives in the same building as him, or to think of the interaction she had with him in VR as something different from how she has always interacted with him.

Darcy wouldn’t go so far as to say it wasn’t real.  It was as real as anything else, but to see it, Darcy had had to look at only the surface of things.  It wasn’t like being inside the web, where everything moved freely into her and out of her.  Where there were no barriers.  In VR there were so many layers in between herself and Jarvis it was like ordinary reality, where her body was clumsy and heavy around her.

Darcy wasn’t sure she liked it.  But she thought of the way it had felt to touch his face still.

Sometimes she could hear one of J.A.R.V.I.S’s more distant voices working on something for Tony that might have been his next attempt.  She sent him her impressions all the time now-- when she smelled something sweet, or touched something with an interesting texture, and he thanked her for it-- but otherwise VR was an unspoken thing between them.

“What are you doing?”  Clint asked, putting his hand over hers, and Darcy realized that she had been rubbing her fingers together, the way she had when she’d held the cherry blossom in between her fingers.

“I don’t know,” Darcy said slowly, looking down at her other hand, “Thinking about what it means to have a body.”

Clint gave her a sideways glance.  “Hmm.  Finally going through puberty?”

Darcy looked down at her breasts, then up at him skeptically.  

Clint looked at her cleavage as well and actually blushed.  “Okay, maybe not that,”  He muttered.

Darcy looked at Clint’s hand covering her own, and aligned their fingers, thinking of Jarvis’s touch, trying to determine what the difference was.  Clint’s hands were calloused, fingernails short and dirty, where Jarvis’s had been clean and soft.  But that wasn’t the difference.  Darcy checked herself, and found her stomach unaffected, her heart beating calmly.

 _Oh._ Darcy pulled her hand back and gave Clint an apologetic smile.  He was staring at her, as shocked and uncomfortable as if she’d stripped naked.  He reached out and ruffled her hair.  

“You should talk to Nat,” He suggested, getting to his feet and offering Darcy a hand up.

Darcy thought of the way Natasha moved, so present in herself, and nodded, letting Clint pull her to her feet.


	13. Paternity

Natasha’s lessons are strange.

The first thing she teaches Darcy is how to breathe, slow and even, feeling the muscles of her ribs expand and contract, her shoulder back.  It’s more uncomfortable than breathing should be.  Her chest muscles protest the new stretch.

“You hunch.”  Natasha said, poking Darcy’s back to remind her of her posture again.

The next thing she makes Darcy do is take a bubble bath while eating chocolate.

“...What is this accomplishing?”  Darcy asked, giving herself a beard with a handful of white foam before accepting another truffle.

“Are you enjoying it?”  Natasha asked, sipping a glass of wine on the floor next to the bathtub.

Darcy shrugged her sore shoulders in the warm water.  It did feel nice.  “Yes.”

“What do you usually do, when you’re uncomfortable-- if your shoulders hurt, or you’re tired, or you’re sad?”  Natasha asked, biting into her own chocolate.

“I leave.”  Darcy admitted, thinking of all the times she’d woken curled in a ball in a pile of dirty laundry with a kink in her neck.

“How are you supposed to know how to be in your body when you run from its needs?” Natasha asked, swirling the wine in her cup before finishing the dregs.

Darcy noticed that she found it a little hard to breath in the heat of the water, and it was her instinct to fracture her consciousness to escape the feeling, to push some part of her mind into the web.  But she stayed there, in the water, and ate more chocolate.

 

Their third lesson is massage.  Natasha is working oil into Darcy’s calf muscles when Tony walks in and stands in bafflement.

“You cheating on my boy?”  He asked, eyebrows raised as he noticed the shine of oil on Natasha’s legs as well.  Darcy, laying on her back on the floor, turned to look at him.

“How, exactly, would J.A.R.V.I.S be unaware of this?”  She asked, relieved to be able to split her attention between the press of Natasha’s hands against her stiff muscles.

Tony didn’t have a response to that, just tilted his head.  Finally he shrugged.  “I was about to dig into your lab results, kid.  Thought you might want to be in on it.”

 _Your idea?_ She asked J.A.R.V.I.S, amused.

 _Of course._ His voice always seemed stronger after Darcy was with Natasha, more like a sound in her ears than a voice in her mind.  

Darcy didn’t bother to put her shoes back on, just padded after Tony with her pants still rolled up to her knees.  He was wearing a long shirt, and Darcy noticed that she was cold.

She must have gotten cold before, but Darcy couldn’t remember feeling that way often.  She took stock of it as Natasha had taught her to, noting the way the small hairs on her arms stood and her nipples tightened.  It was an all-encompassing feeling, like the bath.

That was still an issue for her, discovering the line between pain that she should shy away from and simple discomfort.  There were some feelings of pleasure that tread dangerously close to pain and left Darcy confused.  It was her instinct to avoid them all.  

“Alright, you ready?”  Tony asked once they’d reached the lab.  Darcy nodded, opening her mind up to the flow of information from J.A.R.V.I.S.

“Huh,” Darcy commented, still sorting through everything from her mild anemia to the fact that, apparently, she was genetically predisposed to arrhythmia.

Next to her Tony sat down, hard.

“So, I ran a paternity scan.”  He said, his voice pitched oddly high.  “Just out of curiosity…”

Darcy flipped to that section of her file.  “Oh, yeah.”  She said complacently, still interested in the apparent copper-zinc imbalance in her blood.

“What do you mean, ‘oh, yeah’?” Tony demanded.  “You have  _four parents,_ Darcy, and one of them is  _me._   I don’t remember ever sleeping with Jan Van Dyne, although I guess I can’t rule it out...”

“Tony,” Darcy interrupted, rolling her eyes, “No one slept with anyone.  Four parents didn’t immediately scream ‘lab experiment’ to you?”

“Who’s ‘Douglas Ramsey’?”  Tony demanded, already beginning to comb the web for information,  “This other one doesn’t even have a real name, it just says ‘Forge’.”

“Douglas Ramsey was a mutant known as ‘Cypher’.”  Darcy said, sending J.A.R.V.I.S the information she had on the man so he could display it for Tony, “Pretty passive power, intuitive translation of any language he came across, affinity for technology… He’s dead.”  She added, “So’s Forge.  Another tech mutant, intuitive inventor.”

Darcy sat down in one of Tony’s wheeled chairs and spun in little half circles.  “They did some other stuff with stronger gene lines, but I guess it got a little… messy, so they tried splicing in some homosapien DNA to stabilize things a bit.  Still wanted to go with the ‘tech’ focus, so, you know, you and Jan.”

“You said ‘they’, who’s they?” Tony demanded, and Darcy noticed that he looked pale, sweat visible on his face even though the room was cold.

“There is no ‘they’.  I mean, now.”  She explained.  “I’d go into more detail but I don’t want to get my mom in trouble.”

“And you didn’t think that this was information that I needed to know.”  Tony said slowly, his voice low and dangerous.  “That someone out there is… was… making  _children_ with my DNA?”

“Tony, I don’t know what you know about cloning, but that shit is  _messy._   It’s very scattershot-- you make a fuckload of clones, and you stick them in a whole bunch of surrogates, and if you’re lucky, one of them will turn out relatively normal.”  Darcy shrugged her mouth.  “And when you’ve got that many eggs in that many baskets, it’s hard to keep tabs on all of them.  Mom told them she had a miscarriage, like most of them did.  There were two or three other viable babies, depending on what you consider ‘viable’ to be.”  She ticked them off on her fingers.  “One of them is in long term hospice care, because he can’t communicate verbally or move.  His name is Joseph.  The other two were completely normal, and were put up for adoption.  Max is a waitress, and Mark is an accountant.  After that they scrapped the project.”

Darcy leaned her arms over the back of her chair.  “Joseph’s my favorite, we talk.  But, anyway, by the time I was old enough to really get into all that, it’d been over with for a long time.  I still wiped their servers, obviously,” She added as an afterthought, “And their cold storage systems had some unfortunate electrical malfunctions.  I’m pretty sure none of the samples survived.”

“Pretty sure isn’t really good enough for me, kid.”  Tony said, and then paused to stare at Darcy like he was trying to pick out what parts of her came from him.  He swallowed.  “Why didn’t you  _tell_  me?  I mean, I probably wouldn’t be the best dad, but…”

“Should I go tell Jan?” Darcy asked, raising her eyebrows,  “Or look up the other guys' families and tell them all about the highly illegal medical experiments that my mom got paid for?  I know she’s not on that list, but, she’s the one who gave birth to me, so excuse me for having priorities.  Even if I thought any of those people wanted to know about me, I’m not doing anything that’s going to come back on her.”

“Why let me run the test, then?”  Tony asked, glancing at Darcy’s arm and its old needle scars.  

“...I kind of like you.”  Darcy admitted.  “And you probably would have found a way to get it anyway.  Besides, testing me doesn’t tell you a thing about my mom.  It seemed safe enough.”

“You kind of like me.”  Tony repeated, not sure how to take that.  He stood up and started to walk around the lab aimlessly.  Darcy watched him pace for a while, then got bored and started to sort through her file again.  She was surprised to feel a sweatshirt being tucked around her shoulders.

“You look cold, kid.”  Tony muttered, and resumed his pacing.


	14. Washington

Darcy’s not sure how to classify Tony’s behavior.  If it’s parental it’s parental in a way that she’s unfamiliar with, but it’s certainly different than it was before he knew.

He used to watch her a lot, waiting for her to do something suspicious or interesting, but now it feels like his motivations are different.  It reminds her of Natasha-- as if he’s gathering intel on her to assess what her needs might be.  She never wakes up to find that he’s replaced her clothes with better ones, but sometimes there are little presents left out in places she likes to go.

The first time Natasha sees Darcy eat something Tony’s left for her, she raises her eyebrows.  “You don’t know where that came from.”  She pointed out, as Darcy ate a second piece of chocolate, sending J.A.R.V.I.S what an orange chocolate truffle tastes like.

“Tony.”  Darcy answered, finishing the last piece of candy and throwing the box away.  Natasha tilted her head thoughtfully.

“He likes you now,”  She guessed, “So he’s leaving gifts.  Like a cat.”

“Well, none of them have been dead birds yet,” Darcy shrugged, “But I guess there’s always next time.”

 _Sir says that can be arranged._  J.A.R.V.I.S reported blandly.  Darcy had a faint impression of Tony complaining somewhere and smiled.

She settled her head into Natasha’s lap and pushed past J.A.R.V.I.S and into the web.  

There were thousands of cracks in SHIELD, and Darcy had tried to follow most of them back to their sources.  To pull the string that would lead back to where Zola had hidden himself.

She didn’t find him.  But she found something.

Natasha was working a french braid around Darcy’s head when she sat up, blinking rapidly to ground herself back in reality.

“Washington.”  She said, trying to stand and failing.  She looked back at Natasha with a frown.

“Washington?”  Natasha asked calmly, continuing her braid as if nothing was wrong.  

“Someone needs to--” She started, then bit her lip thoughtfully.  “How well do you know Captain Rogers?”

Natasha paused.  “I know him.”  She wrapped an elastic around the end of Darcy’s hair.  “Not incredibly well, but… he seems like a good man.”

Darcy stretched her back and heard her spine crack.  “He’s going to need help.  Would he trust you?”

“We’ll see.”  Natasha tweaked the end of Darcy’s braid.  “What’s the mission?”


	15. Hacking

Darcy had never hacked a consciousness.

It wasn’t that she  _couldn’t_.  From what Tony had said about her and J.A.R.V.I.S. it seemed like he thought she’d done before-- he didn’t understand what he was accusing her of.  It was the most awful kind of invasion, to press herself into the cracks of who someone was and try to change them.  To decide that  _her_ will was more important than theirs was.

Even with someone like Zola, it was unthinkable.  So she had contained him instead.  Pushed him back into his mainframe, and walled him in there.

She should have been paying more attention to what was happening in Washington, but Natasha kept saying it was ‘under control’.  Encouraged her to keep up with her training.  

Darcy was taking another uncomfortably comfortable bath, drinking a mimosa, when her phone vibrated on the counter.  Just a text message from Jane, and she knew she should lean over the edge of the tub and grab it with her hands, to stay physically present.  But she was wet, and it was so much easier just to reach out for the information.

As soon as her mind made contact with the web, everything that was  _not_ under control poured into her.  Darcy sighed, a little exasperated that Natasha hadn’t called her to help with the tracing program but willing to let her do it her own way until she felt the missiles.  And the open door, to the room where she’d left Zola.

Touching her mind to his burned, and Darcy found herself thinking of how Jarvis had said she looked like a nebula.  If that was what she was, Zola was a black hole, trying to consume her.  And this time, Darcy let him do it, let him pull her inside himself.

She twisted something and felt him power up, his voice droning at Natasha and Captain Rogers.

 _Tell them everything._ Darcy whispered from the inside, and something struggled against it.   _It will delay them, keep them here until they can be destroyed._

 _It makes no difference if he knows.  He will still die._ Zola thought dismissively, but she could feel the current of unease run through him as he showed Captain Rogers through the archives.

Darcy broke his programing slowly, pushing pieces of herself out of him until it snapped him in half.  It made her sick to dismantle him, like dismembering the body of a man she’d murdered, but there couldn’t be anything left here for them to put back together.

Her mercy had cost enough.

Darcy touched her mind to the screens, feeling the shattered center of the one Rogers had punched with a faint sense of amusement.  

“What the fuck, Nat?”  Darcy demanded, her voice booming. Natasha’s whole body relaxed at the sound, although Rogers remained just as tense, glancing from screen to screen.  “This is not under control.”

“Friend of yours?”  Rogers asked, glancing at Natasha.  He looked taken aback at her smile.

“Best friend we could have, under the circumstances.”  She promised, tilting her head at the screen.  “Although I’m not sure what the space invaders thing is about, Cassandra.”

“Space invaders?”  Darcy asked, taking a closer look at the image she was projecting.   Zola’s interface was strangely intuitive, projecting what he thought he looked like instead of one particular version of his face.  She’d sent out something that was an approximation of how her face looked, but it was fragmented into drifting patches of light in places.  “Ah.  I see.  A little body dysmorphia thing going on, I guess.  If you trust him, we can get rid of the code name.”

“I trust him.”  Natasha said simply.  “Steve, this is Darcy Lewis.  Darcy is… a technological expert you’ll meet in New York.  Darcy, Steve Rogers.”

“So… this is a person.”  Steve said, his eyes darting from screen to screen.

“This is how I found the flash drive you hid in that vending machine.”  Natasha said, her body language growing defensive.  "And yes, she is a person."

“Yes, and if you had warned me before you plugged in said flash drive, I could have made the trace slower than 9 minutes.”  Darcy said, annoyed all over again.  “Speaking of which, this place is gonna get bombed soon.”

“How much time do we have?”  Steve looked ready to sprint from the room, on the balls of his feet.  Natasha just raised her eyebrows.  “Why?  You took out Zola, I assume.”

“I did, and thanks for that by the way.  It was really disturbing to hack into a person.”  Steve looked surprised, then thoughtful.  “We need to take out the whole facility, so I’m letting a missile through.”

“He wasn’t a person.”  Natasha said firmly.  “He was a monster.”

“...There are no monsters.”  Darcy said, wondering for the first time if Natasha was the right person to send on this mission.  “I hope you can remember that when you meet the Winter Soldier again.”

“Darcy, I know you like to bring in people from the cold, but-- not him.”  Natasha shook her head.  “He’s not like I was.”

“He’s exactly like you were.”  Darcy disagreed.  “In some ways I think what happened to Sergeant Barnes was worse.”

“What--  _Bucky?_ ”  Steve shook his head.  “No.  That man… Why would you think that?”

“Because that’s who he was, before he was this.  I’ve been trying to break the programing, but every time they wipe him I have to start all over.  Natasha was the closest it ever got.  I thought with the two of you…”

“Wait.”  Natasha held up a hand, looking annoyed.  “ _This_ is why you wanted me to come to Washington?  What about SHIELD?  Or  _Fury_?”

“Fury’s not dead.”  Darcy said, and she wondered if it was possible for her on-screen avatar to roll its eyes.  “Please.  Why would Maria Hill need to take his body?  He was so obviously faking it.”

Steve shook his head, coming out of his shock and starting to look angry.  “I don’t buy it.  Any of it.  You show up here, in this HYDRA base, and you’re not HYDRA?  Telling me Bucky isn’t dead, Fury isn’t dead… He trusted me.  He trusted  _us_.  He wouldn’t do that.”

“He totally would.”  Darcy said, aware that was not the most convincing argument.  “But, whatever.  I can be right later.  Right now you guys should probably get out of here.”

“And go where?”  Steve asked, arms crossed defensively over his chest.  “Since apparently SHIELD is compromised, and we’re both wanted.”

“Lucky for you, you made a friend earlier this week.  Got anything to write an address on?  I’ll let Sam know you’re stopping by.”


	16. Romance

Steve had seen a face, and heard a woman’s voice, but on some level he hadn’t believed Natasha when she’d said that Darcy was a person. It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe that powers like that could exist-- it was the way parts of her face had broken off and floated away as she spoke, like she didn’t have enough of a grasp on what a face looked like to hold it together.

The first time he sees her, she’s lying on the floor of Tony’s lab with her limbs sprawled out.  There’s something wrong with her breathing, and his instinct is to check her pulse.

“Tony,”  Steve said, gesturing to the girl on the floor, not certain if he should touch her.  Tony glanced over and sighed.

“Kid, you gotta stop doing that.”  He informed the body, stripping off his jacket to tuck it under her head for support.  “J, I thought you were taking better care of her than this.”

“My apologies, sir.  I am afraid without intervention from someone with more physical means than myself, such as Agent Romanov, it is often difficult to maneuver her into a more comfortable position.”  Steve tried not to tense up at the sound of the A.I.’s voice.  He’d never been uncomfortable with J.A.R.V.I.S before, but the encounter with Zola had been... very disturbing.

“Then alert me.”  Tony said, pulling the girl’s hair back from her face in a gesture that was surprisingly gentle.  There was something about her that was faintly familiar to Steve, although it was hard to put his finger on it.

“Under ordinary circumstances I would have alerted you, but as this is Captain Roger’s first time receiving a tour of the building, I believed you would not welcome the interruption.”  Tony had straightened the girl’s arms and legs but was still frowning at her position on the floor.

“Hey Cap, do you mind if we take a little detour?”  He asked, slipping his arms underneath the girl to lift her.  “You’re really light, kid.  Thought Romanov was working on that with you.”

“Although Agent Romanov has increased Miss Darcy’s caloric intake significantly, it is still difficult to persuade her to interrupt her work to attend to physical matters.  Much like yourself.”  

Tony blew out a breath and shifted her weight.  “Alright, fine, you win, I’m a hypocrite.  You coming Cap?”

Steve followed behind as Tony carried her from the room, wondering if he should offer to help.  There was something about Tony’s body language that told him he might not welcome handing her over.

He set her down on a couch carefully, tucking his jacket under her head again, and Steve took in all the little details of the girl’s appearance-- the way her clothes looked both brand new and well worn, a smudge of oil on the back of one of her hands.  He could see how she might just let pieces of herself float away.

“So, this is-- who I met in that bunker?”  Steve asked, a part of him still wanting to say ‘what I met’.

Tony raised his eyebrows.  “I don’t know.  Hey J.A.R.V.I.S, you and the offspring make any little side-trips to Washington lately?”

“I do not monitor Miss Darcy’s activities in that sphere.”  J.A.R.V.I.S said, sidestepping the question.

“The…  _Tony_.”  Steve said, and he realized what it was that had felt familiar about her.  “Is she-- This is your daughter?”

“I guess so.”  Tony shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably.  “Just found out about it myself, actually.”

“I can see it…”  Steve looked at her nose, the shape of her face.  “Who was the mother?”

“I have noooo idea.”  Tony said, drawing his vowels out long.  “If she hadn’t hooked up with J.A.R.V.I.S I don’t think we’d have ever met.”

“What do you mean... ‘hooked up’?”  Steve said, wondering if he’d misunderstood that slang.

Tony glanced up.  “You got anything to say, buddy?”

“I am uncertain as to whether what I share with Miss Darcy would fit the parameters of a romantic relationship as defined by most sources I have consulted.”  J.A.R.V.I.S responded.  “As there are no physical or sexual components to our interactions.”

“Hey, what about that time in V.R.,”  Tony protested,  “That was physical, right?  I mean, sort of.  Don’t give up hope, J, she’s serious about you.  I mean, you’ve already moved in together, that’s huge.”

“You’re… encouraging this?”  Steve asked, glancing down at the girl again.

“Steve… you’ve seen what she can do.  At least a little.  Who do you think is really going to understand that?  Or be able to help her?”  Tony ran a hand over his hair, smiling wryly.  “Besides, it wasn’t my idea.”

Steve frowned, trying to imagine what a romantic relationship would look like without ever touching.  If you could even call it that.

“I understand.”  He finally decided.  Wasn’t that what he’d had with Peggy?  They had only kissed once, and it had still been  _something._ They’d both thought it was something.

“Yes, romance without sex.”  Darcy murmured, her eyes still closed.  “What’s next?  Sex without romance?  People minding their own business?   _Who knows?_ ”

“...Could she hear that whole conversation?”  Steve asked in a whisper.

Tony just shrugged.


	17. The Chamber

The new VR chamber had been waiting in Tony’s lab for a week before Darcy wandered down there in the middle of the night.

The floor was warm under her feet, and Darcy took a moment to feel her body.  Natasha had fallen in love with pima cotton and altered Darcy’s wardrobe accordingly, her new pajamas soft and smooth against her skin.  She did feel a little weak, pushing seven hours since she’d last eaten, but she wasn’t sick yet.

The air in the chamber had a weight to it, as if Tony had added something heavier than water to it, and the door clicked shut behind her with a heavy sucking noise.  She sat down, rubbed her fingers over the smooth floor, and closed her eyes.  

The first thing she noticed was the smell, something light and sharp.  Cut grass, or wildflowers.  

“Buttercups.”  Jarvis supplied, and Darcy kept her eyes closed to listen to the sound of the grass shifting around him as he sat.

“Why are we always outside?”  She wondered, and opened her eyes.  She could still see the code, the outline of Jarvis’s body a shadow around the light that was the core of his being… unless she pretended it was one of Natasha’s lessons, and sunk into the feelings.  There really  _was_ a breeze, and a scent in the air.  It was a little cool, the way it would be outside at night, and when Darcy looked up the stars pinwheeled across the sky brighter than they had in New Mexico.

“I believe Sir thought this would prove to be the most ‘romantic’ venue.”  Jarvis answered, following her eyes up the the sky.  “Or perhaps he found it to be a more engaging prospect than programing something as simple as a room.”

“Hmm.”  Darcy responded noncommittally, leaning back onto her hands.  She shifted her weight onto her elbows and lowered herself the rest of the way into the grass, enjoying the soft brush of the stalks against her skin.  Feelings like that were nice.  Uncomplicated.  

“Will you send me your impressions again?”  Jarvis asked, sitting crosslegged in his suit with a straight back that looked both prim and comfortable, his voice calm and curious.  Darcy let her feelings flow out, the sensation of the air, the smell, the sky.

Jarvis frown, pressing a hand to his stomach.  “You’re… nervous?”  

“Yeah.”  Darcy admitted, feeling a strange twinge in her chest that she didn’t understand, but sent along anyway.  He rubbed his hand over his chest in tandem, looking confused.  “Will you braid my hair, like Natasha does?”

Jarvis’s head tilt reminded her of nothing so much as a curious bird, but he shifted closer to her.  Darcy rolled onto her stomach, inhaling the green smell of crushed grass and dirt.  His touch wasn’t hesitant so much as it was light, brushing the tips of his fingers over her hair.  Darcy pulled up the memory of the last time Natasha had done this for her and sent it to him as a reference.  

Jarvis sunk his fingers into her hair to work the tangles out, holding close to the root in case it snagged.  She let him feel it so he would know it didn’t hurt, and he seemed comfortable pulling it tight to work the strands together.  

“You enjoy this sort of physical contact.”  He stated, and Darcy shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s comforting.”  She answered, trying to pick apart the feeling inside her own mind so she could explain it to him.  “Being taken care of, I guess.”

He ran a hand over her finished braid experimentally.  “Physical contact is comforting.”

“Yes.”  Darcy agreed.  “I mean, sometimes.  Things like this.  Sometimes it’s… I don’t know.  A lot of things don’t just feel good, or bad, they’re kind of a mix.  Natasha says I should to sit with my feelings when it’s like that.”

“Could you provide examples?”  Jarvis asked politely, drawing his fingers softly over her hair in a way that made Darcy suppress a shiver.

“Hugs.  They’re nice, but with some people it’s too… personal?  I don’t know.  But it’s not comforting.”  She paused to think of another example.  “Days that are too sunny.  Spicy food.”

Jarvis was silent for a moment.  “But you anticipated that this contact would be unambiguously enjoyable, thus your request for it.  What other contact fits that profile?”

“Putting my head in Clint’s lap.  When Tony put his jacket on me.”  Darcy thought, then shook her head.  “Things with my mother… um.  Eskimo kisses.  Rubbing my back.”

“What is an ‘eskimo kiss’?”  He asked, moving his hand to her shoulder and drawing it down the smooth fabric of her shirt to her waist, then back up again.

“It’s where you rub your noses together.  My mom used to do it when she was tucking me into bed.”  Darcy yawned and moved her hands under her face, the press of the stalks of grass less than comfortable where it left impressions in her skin.

“These are all gestures that you associate with physical and emotional safety.”  Jarvis observed, continuing to run his hand over her back.  “Comfort is defined most commonly as a state of freedom from pain, but this seems too neutral.”

Darcy nodded, shifting her shoulders back into a more relaxed position.  This feeling was more than just a lack of discomfort, it was… impossible to describe it beyond a feeling of warmth, and safety. 

 

When she woke up, someone had put a blanket over her, and she was alone.


	18. Bucky

It took her weeks to realize that Steve was waiting for her to tell him about Bucky.

As far as Darcy knew, Steve was constantly tense, because that was the only way she had ever seen him-- stiff shouldered, hyperaware of his surroundings.

He  _was_ a soldier, though.  She just assumed that was what soldiers were like.  Natasha and Clint had an ease about them, but they were something else.

His eyes don’t follow anyone else around the room though, not even Tony, in spite of the way that their bickering flirted with fighting most of the time.  Only Darcy.  

But… He had hovered near Tony when he’d picked her up from the floor, like he wanted to be close by in case he dropped her.  That didn’t feel like the behavior of someone who was wary because he thought she was dangerous.  

Leaning on the kitchen counter, waiting for her coffee to brew with Steve staring at her from one of the bar stools, she thinks of the look on Clint’s face when he asked her where Kate was, and something clicks into place.  

“I can’t tell you where he is.”  Darcy said, like they were already in the middle of a conversation.  And maybe they are, from the way Steve’s face sets, like he’s been waiting for this.

“I want to--”  He shook his head, abandoning his sentence.  “I  _need_  to help him.  He needs help.”

Darcy chewed on her bottom lip, trying to find the right words for what she knew.  “I don’t think anyone else could track him.  He’s been careful-- very off the grid.  And if you find him, and he’s not ready, and he runs again, there will be consequences.”

“I’m willing to take them.  Whatever they are.”  Steve said, and it’s easy to feel the pull he has, even without the suit.  He has an absolute conviction that would be impossible to fake.

Darcy shook her head.  “Not for you.  For him.”

He went stiff, eyes darting over her face, and Darcy heard belatedly how much that might have sounded like a threat.  “He’s off the grid.”  She repeated.  “But… I can feel the arm.  If he figures that out…”

All the blood drained from his face, and he stared blankly in front of himself, looking at something she couldn’t see.  “He’d cut it off.  Or disable it, somehow.”  

“Or he’d try to.”  Darcy agreed.  “I don’t know what that would do.  It’s wired into his nervous system.”

Steve was shaking his head-- not like he disagreed with her.  Like he wanted to banish the thought.  “What do we do?  I can’t just leave him out there.  Alone.”

It was difficult to look at his face, with his feelings so rawly displayed, but Darcy met his eyes.  “When he wants to be found, he will be.  I’m doing what I can, to spark something.  He’s…”  She hesitated to call him ‘okay’.  “He’s not in any danger, right now.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath that left his shoulders just as tense.  “You will tell me.  When there’s intel I can act on, without…”

Darcy considered lying, but there was something about Steve that was so wrenchingly sincere.  “If you’re the best person to act on it.  Yes.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Then you won’t know about it.”  She admitted.  “I’ve been trying... The Winter Soldier has been on my radar for a long time.”  Darcy swallowed.  “I don’t think things would have been so horrible for him, if I hadn’t interfered.”

When he spoke, Steve’s voice was icy and calm, and Darcy wanted to retreat from it the way she would from physical pain.  “Explain what you mean by that.”

“I mean that the first time I found him, I hadn’t done this before, and I--it-- disrupted his programing.  That’s when they started wiping him after every mission.”  Her voice was getting softer against her will, but she kept looking at him, thinking about Natasha and chocolate and Jarvis’s fingers in her hair.  Keeping herself in the moment.  “If they take him again, he’s not ever coming back out again.”

When he stepped around the counter, Darcy wasn’t sure what she thought his intentions were.  To get closer so he could hear her better, maybe.  He stroked a thumb across her cheek and it came away wet.  Darcy blinked, trying to remember the last time she’d cried.  She hadn’t noticed herself doing it-- perhaps she cried all the time.

“We are going to get him back.”  Steve said firmly, like he truly believed that was the way it had to be.  “He’s coming back.”

Darcy shook her head, making her cheek brush across his palm, but… it was hard not to believe in Steve.  


	19. Ghost Stories

Darcy didn’t know how she’d fucked up this time-- couldn’t think of a signal she could have tripped, unless he could sense her-- but she must have telegraphed herself somehow.

Why else would Bucky Barnes be in a hotel room in Queens, trying to cut his arm from his body?

She had been sleeping when it started, curled on the floor of the VR chamber under the blanket that always seemed to appear by the time she woke in the morning.  There was something itching at the back of her mind lately, like a word she couldn’t remember, and the chamber had become something like a midnight snack to Darcy.  It was the place she always found herself late at night, when she was restless and dissatisfied-- like staring into a refrigerator, looking for something she wanted that wasn’t there.  While she was with Jarvis, she felt satisfied, but by noon, it was there again.

Something was missing.  Something was wrong.

Her consciousness had ties to so many things that the wrongness could be a thousand things, but this felt close.  It reminded her of the few times she’d been away from civilization, the silence left when she couldn’t hear the hum of electricity anymore.  There was a stillness that shouldn’t be there.  

What was happening with Bucky felt more like... static.  As he worked the knife into his shoulder to examine the connections, the scrape of the blade against the metal set her teeth on edge.

Darcy woke up when he started trying to pry it loose, disoriented and sweating.  She reached out blindly, feeling for something she could distract him with-- a radio, suddenly too loud.  A television broadcasting something about Steve.  But there was nothing, not even a burner phone.

The only thing she could do was flick the lights.

 

“Captain Rogers.”  J.A.R.V.I.S’s voice had the tone of one who had been repeating himself for some time.  

Steve’s eyes were sticking together from too little sleep, already taking stock of the situation.  It was the middle of the night, dark and still-- not an emergency, then.  

Or-- not an Avenger’s emergency.

“Captain Rogers, your presence is requested in Queens.”  J.A.R.V.I.S continued, ascertaining that he was awake.  Analyzing J.A.R.V.I.S’s emotional state, (if such a thing existed) was always difficult for Steve, but there was something about it now that was almost strained.  “I will provide you with more specific directions when you are en route, should you choose to make the journey.”

The wording was off as well, lacking prurient details that would have ordinarily been included.   _Your presence is requested._ “Take the bike?”  Steve asked, his feet hitting the floor.

There was only one person who might need his help, who could alert J.A.R.V.I.S without alerting the rest of the tower.

“A motorcycle would be ideal for this task.”  J.A.R.V.I.S agreed, and that was all Steve needed to hear to put his boots on.  

 

It was a good thing he’d taken the bike.  The allies were narrow, crowded with dumpsters and garbage that he had to swerve around.  He was driving too fast, but J.A.R.V.I.S’s directions seemed to take civilians into consideration.

He tried not to think about anything other than the road and the next movement of his body, the way he would during a battle, but there was too much time and silence for that.  He couldn’t stop himself from making plans that sparked and died in the wake of the reality.

From his earpiece J.A.R.V.I.S’s voice directed him to a warehouse, and from there he followed the blood.  

They were bleeding slowly, whoever had left the trail, dripping instead of gushing.  Steve had no idea what to hope for-- that this was someone Bucky or Darcy had injured in a fight, but he didn’t believe that.  Darcy didn’t strike him as that sort of fighter, and Bucky… there would have been a body.

“Your destination will be the third door on your right.”  J.A.R.V.I.S informed him, as if he could have missed the small puddle where it had taken someone a moment to break the lock while they spilled more of their blood on the floor.

Then he was through the door, letting it hit the wall harder than he’d intended, the broken door knob clanging against the wall.  

Bucky was the one who was bleeding, red lines running down the shiny chrome of his arm, and Steve felt something in his chest release, a fear he hadn’t acknowledged that Bucky might have hurt Darcy letting go.  He couldn’t class her as a civilian, but as far as physical threats went… he hadn’t wanted to believe that Bucky, even as he was now, would have hurt a girl like that.

But on some level, he’d been bracing for it.

Bucky seemed unconcerned with staunching the blood flow, or with Steve's presence in the room-- he didn’t even look up.  He was sitting on the floor with his legs spread in an approximation of his old, careless way, and Steve tried to find the man he remembered.  There was a tightness to his face that hadn’t been there, but he thought there was something in his eyes that had changed from when he’d last seen Bucky on the helicarrier.  There had been something frightened about his eyes.  Now he looked focused, like a bird dog waiting for a signal, staring across the room.

Steve followed his gaze and found Darcy on the dirty cement floor in a sprawl, her eyes moving behind her eyelids.  

“Almost got it,”  She murmured, as if to herself, “You may feel something when it goes offline.”

In his lap, Bucky’s metal arm twitched like a muscle in it had fallen asleep, and he sat bolt upright, tense and ready to react.

Darcy blinked a few times, orienting herself, then sat up, giving Steve a little wave.  There were clumps of dust tangled in her hair and streaked down her shirt, and Steve fought the impulse to snap at her.  Bucky was a few feet away, still tight as a bowstring and staring.

Bucky shook his head, clearing a thought from it, and let out a huff.  “Ghost in the machine.”

Steve’s forehead wrinkled, trying to remember where he’d heard that term before.  “It’s what they call me.”  Darcy explained, catching his confusion.  “Hydra.”

“Ghost story.”  Bucky agreed, then shrugged, inciting a fresh flow of blood.  “Good excuse.  ‘The computer blew up, all on its own’.”

“Why’d you let me come here, then?”  Darcy asked, yawning halfway through,  “If you don’t believe in me?”

Bucky raised an eyebrow, and Steve caught something familiar in his face, the echo of an old smirk.  “Never said I didn’t believe.  Just said it was a good excuse.”  

Bucky still hadn’t looked over at the doorway, but the next thing he said felt addressed to him.  “Ghosts have to believe in ghost stories.”


	20. Waterfall

There was a humming background noise in the tower’s systems.

It was easy to ignore because it was so pervasive, but Darcy thought it was getting more intense.  Not louder, per se; the difference between the sound of a television set left on to blare static to an empty room, and a river raging.  There was a sense of building power behind it that would have made Darcy uneasy under any circumstances even if it hadn’t been trying to hide from her.  When she pushes at it with her mind, it has a rubbery quality, smooth and reflective-- and J.A.R.V.I.S didn’t seem to know it was there.  

Or his consciousness had been split to cordon it off.

It was natural for J.A.R.V.I.S’s consciousness to be fractured between tasks, but Darcy could always hear him whispering in the background.  There’s no voice for this place, behind the shiny wall, or if there is a voice, it’s lost in the cacophony.  And touching it gives Darcy a strange sensation, pins and needles and then numbness in her face that becomes almost painful.

She  _could_  break in, but it would cost something.

It takes her an embarrassingly long time to think of walking in to the room it’s coming from, one of the floors the lifts skip.

The lab has an open layout of the type that Tony had started to favor, every exit visible from the center, and that was where it lay.  The long silver curve of the staff was supported at each end to keep it from touching the counter… glowing, with that strange shine that Darcy had come to recognize.

The Asgardians she had met seemed to see their magic and Earth’s technology as two spots on the same continuum, but they had never felt quite the same to her.  Magic made her  _feel_  things when she touched it, filled her up until she was overflowing.  Technology was slipping into a cool bath; magic was trying to pour a waterfall into a cup.

She should have known it from the way it had felt to reach for it, but her body had begun to do and feel so many new things of late, how was she to know that this was not one one of them?  Maybe people who lived in their skin just grew used to the constant discomfort of their stomachs stabbing them for food and the way her shoulders always seemed to ache.

Darcy sat down to wait for Tony to finish putting on his pants to come deal with the security breach she’d initiated, putting out tentative feelers towards the J.A.R.V.I.S in the lab.  He was limited, just the bare outline of his normal operating system, but still himself.  Proto J.A.R.V.I.S.  

 _Is this like seeing your baby pictures?_  Darcy floated, amused.  A few of the whispers in the tower went silent as J.A.R.V.I.S turned his attention to the room.

 _It… may be something like that,_ he said, his tone pushing something heavy into Darcy’s stomach that made her pull her arms close around herself.  She didn’t know what the feeling was, just that it made her need to dawn in on herself.   _I was unaware that there were any backups of myself operating independently._

They watched Tony stumble into his private elevator with one pant leg trailing enough to trip him, the lines in his face drawn in tight and tense.  This close to the scepter, Darcy felt the hair on her arms start to stand in response.  If she reached out to it, her skin would start to tingle, pleasantly at first, then painfully, then numb.

She wanted very much to be away from it.

“Miss Lewis, you appear to be in some distress.”  The lab’s J.A.R.V.I.S chimed in, his voice less nuanced than what she had become accustomed to.  “May I offer my assistance?”

“I’m fine, thank you J.A.R.V.I.S.”  Darcy said, still huddled on the floor.   She wasn’t certain if her usual method of speech would be confusing to this version of him.  “I’ll just wait for Tony.”

“Very good, miss.”  The lab J.A.R.V.I.S chirped, and returned to its preassigned tasks.  His system didn’t seem complex enough to address complicated emotional issues, and he seemed relieved not to be required to try.

 _He is very rudimentary,_ J.A.R.V.I.S commented in disapproval.   _Assistance should be provided in advance of the inquiry.  It diminishes the chance of refusal by 80%._

 _Tony probably wanted his safety protocols to be limited,_ Darcy replied, climbing reluctantly to her feet as Tony’s elevator approached the lab,  _otherwise he might have interfered.  That_ she broadcast the image of the staff along with the tingling pain it sent through her  _is not safe._

“This is way less super villain than it seems,”  Tony blurted as soon as the doors to the elevator doors opened, taking Darcy’s crossed arms as a sign of disapproval.  “And it’s just for a few days.”

“And yet, this version of my operating system appears to have been operational for some time.”  J.A.R.V.I.S responded in a cool voice.

“I have been operational for five weeks, three days.”  The lab J.A.R.V.I.S interjected helpfully, and Tony rubbed at his eyes with one hand.

“Look, you’re just… really tight with the offspring,”  He threw up his hands defensively to fend off a rebuttal,  “And I’m all for it, I honestly am, but buddy, you’re compromised.  I need to know my information’s not going to trickle up to Asgard.”

“I am well aware of your need for privacy, sir.” J.A.R.V.I.S’s voice was a carbon copy of the version of him in the lab, all inflection wiped clean, and Darcy frowned, reaching out to trace the outlines of him in the system.  He pushed back against her like a cat bunting, and she wondered if he found interacting with the stripped down, bare bones version of himself as disquieting as she did.  It felt as if he had walked up the hill in the VR chamber and was suddenly missing an arm.

Steve’s cautious dance around Bucky made an abrupt kind of sense.

Tony sighed, looking petulant, and Darcy tried to find the right thing to say to him to make him understand.  “It’s not going to stay contained.”  She told him, turning her body a little further away from the septer.

“I’ve got it on lockdown.  No one can get onto this floor unless they’re me, or with me.”  Tony promised, as if that would be a reassurance to someone who could feel the power putting out tendrils that had reached to her bedroom and pulled her here.  To someone who could hear the pounding of the waterfall against the rocks.

“I’m staying here.”  Darcy decided, sitting back down with extreme reluctance, the hairs on her arm moving to stretch towards the power on the counter as she turned to face it.  “I need to watch it.”

 _Don’t leave me,_ she asked silently, and was surprised to hear J.A.R.V.I.S answer  _Of course_  in duplicate.


	21. Absence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who have been waiting patiently for an update to this, such a short chapter must be a disappointment, but there will be another soon-- this was just the right place to stop.

It crawled into her.

After so many lessons with Natasha, Darcy thought she’d be able to recognize the difference between something infecting her mind and something infecting her body, but this seemed to be neither.  It stung down her arms and into her fingers, needling and stabbing at the flesh until she found her body curling in on itself, but her skin was just as pale and intact as always.  It wasn’t _real_ , and yet every sense screamed that it was a physical pain.

After the first half hour, she was on the floor in the fetal position with her hands pressed to the cold tiles.  It didn’t numb her, or pull out any of the pain, but it comforted her a little all the same.  Like someone pretending to adjust the bandages on a phantom limb.

She could sense the J.A.R.V.I.Ses talking to each other-- or maybe she was just hearing them.  Were they broadcasting their voices, or was it in her head?  The line between them felt so blurry now, like if she leaned too far forward her consciousness would fall out of her body.

“--signs of extreme distress.” One of the J.A.R.V.I.S voices said, clear enunciation almost bitingly exact. “Despite your highly abbreviated safety protocols, even _you_ must be required to summon--”

An intense pain shot through Darcy’s body from the center of her head, as if it were radiating from her brain outwards.  She screamed in all the ways she knew how, pushing her feelings at the J.A.R.V.I.Ses without any articulation.  Words felt like too much to ask for right now.

The release seemed to drive it back, the thing that was trying to push Darcy out of the space she occupied within herself, to pry her out like the meat in an oyster.  For a moment, she could breathe.

“This data is incredibly corrupted.” A J.A.R.V.I.S. said, puzzled. “I do not understand what she is attempting to convey.”

“It is emotion.” The second voice replied, louder than the first, yelling. “It is _pain.”_

_It’s emotion,_ Darcy repeated, chasing the feeling that this was important.  She remembered how she had always studiously avoided her feelings, fleeing into the net instead of experiencing them, J.A.R.V.I.S’s confusion whenever she let them taint her thoughts.

Taking advantage of the moment of levelheadedness, Darcy pulled up the most unpleasant experiences she could-- the intense desolation of a friend’s death, her stomach-clenching disgust the time she’d gone into a man’s computer and found his stash of child pornography, every detail of what it was to feel bad down to the nausea and physical weakness she’d always experience with her worst bouts of depression.

When the power reached out to touch her again, Darcy poured her feeling into it the way it was trying to pour itself into her, filling it to overflowing.

It fought, lashing out, and Darcy felt something sear down her arms.  It felt very real, like there was blood running over her hands-- she could smell burning skin.

Darcy held on, pushing the feeling into the thing inside Loki’s staff and forcing it to experience everything she was, but she was beginning to lose control.  Her body was shaking convulsively from the stress and pain of whatever had hurt her.  She could hear herself screaming, but it sounded like something happening somewhere far off, to someone much younger than she was.

The edges of her vision went black, and closed in until she was in darkness.

And she knew nothing.

 

The next thing Darcy felt was a throbbing in her head and a cool numbness in her arms that promised discomfort as soon as the lidocaine--or whatever painkiller currently coated her skin-- wore off.  Something nearby was beeping, and she reached out for it without thinking, feeling down the monitor's connection to an outlet and then up into the systems that ran the tower.  Everything was still moving, laundry washing, fabrication bots going through the motions of their tasks, but there was no guiding hand tweaking the processes.  No watchmaker winding the gears.

_ J.A.R.V.I.S? _


	22. Not Him

There were a lot of people around her body in the days to come, but Darcy tried not to notice them.  It was surprisingly hard.  It seemed as if Tony had nothing better to do than sit beside her and talk and talk, some of the words filtering into her mind in spite of the barriers she’d erected.  In the past she would have been utterly insensible, but she was tethered to her flesh now, bound to feel it when Natasha’s fingers worked her hair into a braid or someone passed a cool cloth over her forehead to clean the oil from her skin.  Every time the sensations tried to claim her she pushed her them away-- if she felt her body, her feelings couldn’t be far behind.  They were waiting back there like a black hole.

She cut herself free and drifted, but her mind inevitably traced old paths.  Darcy refused to acknowledge that she was checking on her people, making sure that the rest of them, at least, were still there.

She spent almost a full day with her brother, wallowing in the comforting monotony of his life as an apparently vegetable.  It interested her to see how they maintained his body while his mind wandered-- they could do that for her, if she decided to stay like this.  To be the ghost in the machine.

And then a touch snapped her back to her body, the sensation of a familiar palm being pressed against hers penetrating her consciousness with a painful shock.  She abandoned Joseph to contemplate the tick-tick-tick of the clock above his bed alone, and was immediately consumed by agony.

 _He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead_ her mind chanted, shocked out of numbness by that soft touch, so like his when they’d met in the VR chamber.  Darcy tried to curl into a ball, but the movement pulled of the IV in her arm and the pain was too much.  Everything was too intense, sounds too loud, light too bright even with her eyes closed.

With a gasping choke, she started to cry.

The hand stroked her hair back from her face, and she felt herself shift as her mattress dipped towards a weight of another body positioning itself on the edge of her bed.  A shadow blocked the light that was stabbing through her eyelids, and then something rubbed briefly and hesitantly along one side of her nose, then the other.

Darcy tried to sit up and her back spasmed from the sudden movement, eyes streaming with tears from lack of use and pain.  While the spots cleared from her vision she tried to calm herself by focusing on the way her heart was beating, but it was too fast and irregular to give her any comfort.

“I’m very sorry,” And it wasn’t his voice, as it had always been spoken, it was his voice as it had been in the net, with all its nuance, “It was my intention to offer-- unambiguous comfort, is the phrase that comes to mind-- but obviously, I’ve caused you some distress.”

“Jarvis?” She asked it in a whisper, because it was all she could do with her throat so dry.  A straw was held to her lips, and she drank gratefully.

“I am not him.” The man said simply, and as her vision finally began to clear Darcy saw him tilt his head thoughtfully. “But I am not… _not_ him.  He composes some of me.  I am Vision.”

His face was the red/purple of wine, capped by a contrasting green that looked bluer where the florescent lights overhead touched it, but even without its strange coloring it wouldn’t have been Jarvis’s face.  But it was something _like_ his face, somehow.

Tentatively, she reached out with her mind to see if she could feel him.

“That is a strange sensation,” Vision commented, raising his eyebrows with surprise. “I have experienced contact with another consciousness, but they have all been hostile.”

 _But we used to talk like this all the time,_ Darcy told him, coloring it with the comfort she’d always felt, surrounded by his presence. _Don’t you remember?_ He’d touched her hand, and done an Eskimo kiss.  He still knew her.

“I cannot recall specifics.  I do not have his memories.  I am not him.” He repeated the words like a mantra, something he’d had to insist upon to person after person. “But I know that you were dear to each other.  I thought… No.” He corrected, with some confusion. “I felt I could be some comfort to you.”

His tone on the word ‘felt’ had distance to it, a foreign concept he was still trying to integrate into his world view.  Darcy remembered J.A.R.V.I.S’s puzzled interest when she would send him her feelings, then wondered how much of this was her _wanting_ to see him in this Vision.

He was looking at her with his head tilted, his face very close to hers as he stared. “I was called to see you, very strongly.  I am trying to understand why.”

Darcy shook her head, then leaned forward to bump her forehead to his.  Underneath the skin his skull felt hard and metallic, but his flesh was smooth and elastic-- and warm, just as any human’s would be. “You know why.”

“I’m not him.” Vision told her again, then reached up to touch her forehead curiously, as if he’d found the contrast between their bodies to be as strange as she had.

"Then what are you?" Darcy challenged, returning the gesture and touching his face.  It was strange to feel the movements of what must be muscles under his skin.  They seemed to be made of something thick and soft, like he was more liquid than solid inside.

"That is... something I am still exploring." He admitted, and mirrored her movement.


End file.
